1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to data recognition equipment and to a data recognition method, and particularly to equipment and a method for recognizing written data such as hand-written characters, symbols, drawings, etc.
2. Related Background Art
Conventionally this sort of equipment employs such method as the input of coordinates using a pen and up-down data of pen movement on a data tablet, etc., and uses those data to identify or recognize characters written on the data tablet. For on-line character recognition, in order to cope with the increase of processing involved in the recognition of Chinese characters, proposals have been made on methods such as the following: a partial pattern is first recognized, at the side or in the main body of the Chinese character, prior to the comparison of the features of input data with the character data of a dictionary, character data to be compared are selected and the input data are compared with a smaller number of candidate characters, thus saving the time required for recognition.
However, in the case of the above conventional systems, comparison is made of the entire character, and therefore the time involved in recognition has remained high. To be concrete, even when it is found that a given character is impossible to recognize, processing proceeds until the comparison of the entire character is over, and therefore time is wasted.